Letters to the Editor
Jeffrey P. Harrison
Published Letters: 354 Editor's Choice: 39
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Hysteria doesn't help.
[Read the article: The Great Depression: The sequel]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Nor does your cluelessness about history. Nor does your mad desire for yet more governmental regulation. Allow me to make a few points.
Prior to the Great Depression (GD), there was no unemployment insurance, Social Security, Medicare/cade, Workman's Comp, Welfare, FHA, etc, etc. Some of these social safety net features we can thank FDR for; some belong to later administrations. They're still in place. Reasonable men may disagree about how robust these safety nets are as compared to earlier times but your claim that we less prepared for a downturn than since the GD is so totally specious as to be bogus.
The housing market today is fundamentally different than it was in 1929. This difference is neatly caught by Adam Smith (pseudonym) in his 1979 book Paper Money where he says "...but your home isn't an investment, it's where you live." How is it that they ceased to be a home and became an investment (which have the habit of increasing and decreasing in value)? Whew! That would take pages and pages. I will point at two things: the death of the Savings and Loan, and the removal of the wall between investment and commercial banks. These two structures were put in place after the GD. The first allowed people to get low interest mortgages for their home (which weren't investments at the time). The second ensured that commercial banks weren't using uninsured, speculative investment bank paper for their reserves. The reason investment banks weren't regulated like commercial banks with reserve requirements etc is because they weren't insured and they couldn't borrow from the Fed. But that was OK because commercial banks couldn't hold their paper so if an investment bank failed, a bunch of fat cats lost their shirt but the banking system would be safe. Thus I agree with you that the proposed changes in regulation are bullshit. This is not a regulation issue. It is a fundamental financial system structure issue (which is not done via regulation). The current system doesn't need more regulation, it needs restructuring.
Your expostulation does an excellent job of ignoring the role of business. Business is the engine that provides jobs that allow people to make money and buy houses, cars, etc, etc. You and your beloved regulations have been choking business for decades (when it takes 20 permits just to be able to raise logs from the bottom of Lake Superior that have been sitting for the last 100 years, you know something is seriously wrong. Even The Economist has poked fun at the over regulation of US society). When that happens, business is going to move (hint: that's called overseas). When the jobs go, your wealth goes.
I do agree with you about the 1%/20%. It's obscene. And the argument that they are more productive is also bullshit. Bill Gates, productive? Puleeze! He's a notorious monopolist who not only got to keep his monopoly but also his money because of Bill Clinton's justice department (BTW, this is being written on a Mac). And how about those poor executives at NW Airlines who became multi-millionaires (again) because they had to work their poor fingers to the bone to get NWA out of bankruptcy? Nobody mentions that they got NWA into bankruptcy in the first place but apparently that's merely a detail. Or the multi-million dollar severance packages for failed CEOs? Productive? I don't think so. In my darker moments I think that executives who make more than some nominal multiple of the average wages that they pay the people who actually do the producing should be taxed at 99.99% for everything over that nominal multiple.
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Last I checked
[Read the article: John Yoo's war crimes]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]the "I was just following orders" was not accepted as a positive defense at the Nuremberg trials. I don't see why it should be so now except that, as you point out, heretofore, War Crimes trials have been about punishing the losers and not real justice, per se.
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This is such bullshit
[Read the article: Yet another "3 a.m." ad released]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]So Three-Names heads straight for the sewer (Oh, that was a big surprise) with this bullshit 3AM ad which, of course, is straight out of the Republican play book of trying to frighten the electorate. When did Americans become such wusses? It's about this time that the words of a truly great American ring in my ears: We have nothing to fear but fear itself....
So now this ad has been parodied by both the other candidates. Is the electorate actually seduced by this ephemeral crap?
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It is the panacea of the incompetent
[Read the article: The DOJ comments on the Mukasey controversy]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Ever notice how the less competent the worker, the more resources they want to do their job? That's because, since they don't really know what they are doing, they grab at anything and everything in an effort to find something that will let them get their job done.
This regime is nothing if not supremely incompetent.
Interestingly, Robert Silverberg in his 1976 novel Shadrach in the Furnace explores some of the consequences of the information overload associated with spying on everybody.
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Sana mens, sana capore
[Read the article: Choose one: Sex or respect]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Any healthy adult relationship (as opposed to either adolescent or friendship) has both a physical and an intellectual dimension. Focusing on one or the other is like trying to stand on one leg which generally results in things falling over eventually because you start looking for the missing dimension somewhere else (sometimes with ladies of negotiable virtue).
There is a name for the relationships that they seek to establish: platonic. And that's fine as long as you understand that either (a) you're not going to find a life partner that way or (b) you like to fill inside straights. Intellectual compatibility does not guarantee physical compatibility and vice a versa. Filling inside straights isn't a good poker strategy either.